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Real-Life UFOs, From Flying Flapjacks to Mystery Missiles

If you listen to the Air Force tell it, there are simply no such things as UFOs. A two-decade investigation called Project Blue Book determined in 1969 that no extraterrestial life has made contact with Earth. And no unexplained aerial phenomena have exceeded humanity's scientific grasp, let alone threatened national security.

The "do they or don't they exist" debate won't be settled until someone from far away asks to be taken to our leaders. And the controversy makes it easy to forget that a UFO isn't actually a ship full of little green men. It's a placeholder for a puzzle the mind can't solve. So, it's also easy to forget that, much like the Insane Clown Posse observed about miracles, UFOs are all around us.

From weird drones to cheeky satellites to things that manifest themselves to the naked eye as little more than plumes of smoke, the skies can be a mysterious, congested place. Here, we take a look at the most striking curiosities of aviation, both foreign and domestic, including actual flying saucers.

That's the trouble with aliens: the misdirection. You spend too much time tracking down intergalactic visitors and you'll miss the oddities that humans invented for getting around our home planet.

Above: The Canuck Flying Saucer

The best engineering minds in two countries couldn't quite figure out how to make the Canuck Flying Saucer work. A joint venture in the 1950s between the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and the Canadian aviation company Avro, the VZ-9 Avrocar was supposed to be a "revolutionary" supersonic ship that brought extraterrestrial style to the military-industrial complex.

The 18-to-25-foot pancake was to lift off vertically, thanks to a five-foot fan in its belly. The "focusing ring" around its exterior would push air outward in the opposite direction its pilot wanted to fly. Manufacturers called it "Ground Effect Takeoff and Landing," or GETOL.

And it did pretty well if you only wanted to go five or six feet off the ground. Higher altitudes would cause the craft to pitch wildly, a flaw its engineers couldn't overcome. After about 10 years and as many million dollars, the military pulled the plug in 1960. But visitors to the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia, check out the prototype and imagine what might have been.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

The (Tiny) Probe Droid You've Been Looking For

With its squat body and tendril-like stands drooping down, this mini-drone might have been inspired by the Probot spy droid used to find the Rebel Alliance on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. It has a similar function: Honeywell's T-Hawk, made for the Army is a hovering clunker used for reconnaissance missions.

Snapping imagery from more than 7,000 feet in the air, the T-Hawk is designed to give soldiers a view of the dangers ahead of them if they don't have the runway space to launch a full-sized drone. Weighing just 17 pounds, the T-Hawk is small enough to fit in a backpack, and its ducted fan launches it straight into the sky.

Alas, it's not as autonomous as the Probot, since soldiers below need to tell the T-Hawk where to go with a joystick-based remote-control system. But it's been used in Iraq, where thirsty soldiers dubbed it the Flying Beer Can, and seems not to have suffered for its inadequacies relative to the Galactic Empire model. Indeed, Honeywell says it's building a "much larger" T-Hawk for the Army that'll be ready for tests in 2012, as well as a version for police anti-drug missions. Even if you're hiding on an ice planet, it'll find you.

Photo: U.S. Navy

The Spy Plane That Started Area 51

In 1997, a study in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence journal concluded that "manned reconnaissance" flights account for "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s." That figure is disputed in the UFO-studying community. But what's beyond argument is that the U-2, the mother of all U.S. Air Force spy planes, played a seminal role in UFOlogy.

Introduced in the 1950s, the U-2 is loaded with sensors and cameras to snap pictures and scarf up enemy signals from 70,000 feet in the air. It took the photos of Russian missiles in Cuba that nearly touched off a nuclear war in 1962, and it's still in use over Afghanistan today.

It's so synonymous with secrets that it was developed at what would come to be known as Area 51 in Nevada. In fact, no U-2, no Area 51: The facility opened because in 1955 Lockheed's secret-plane builders wanted somewhere to experiment on their U-2 away from prying eyes. Had they chosen somewhere outside the Nevada desert, a cultural touchstone might never have developed.

One of Area 51's founders was Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, a Lockheed honcho who built the facility near Groom Lake, Nevada, at the CIA's behest. Ironically, Johnson was no UFO skeptic. He's quoted as saying in 1948: "I should state that for at least five years, I have definitely believed in the possibility that flying saucers exist — this in spite of a good deal of kidding from my technical associates." By giving the U-2 a home, he made believers out of millions more.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Chinese Mystery Anti-Ballistic Missile

On its own, China's test of an anti-ballistic missile in January probably wouldn't have caused a stir, if not for two additional factors. First, it came right after the U.S. sold Patriot air-defense missiles to Taiwan, so Washington took it as payback. Second, no one knows exactly what kind of missile the Chinese launched.

Some Chinese citizens, perhaps unaccustomed to their nation's first missile-defense test, looked for a less earthly explanation. After seeing a "white circular structure about the size of dozens of moons" on the day of the launch, a worker at the Jiuquan space center in Gansu conclued, "it may be an alien voyager from another planet."

His was one of several claimed UFO sightings in China during the test, a testament to the imagination's ability to fill a vacuum in explainable phenomena. Then again, Beijing never actually denied that its obscure missile is based on alien technology.

Photo: Xinhua

The Navy Can't Resist an Otherworldly Satellite Pun

If you build satellites for a living, you've got to spend part of your time designing programs whose acronyms abbreviate to spaced-based puns.

Boeing employees sure did. The Navy uses a series of high-frequency satellites to keep its ships and mariners talking to each other. In the 1990s, it hired Boeing to give them an upgrade. That led to 601 pieces of cheekily named space junk. Since the original satellites were known as Ultra High Frequency, Boeing dubbed its revamps the UHF Follow-On. Get it?

With a payload like that, it's a good thing the blimp will be the size of a football field and seven stories tall. Not quite Hindenberg-sized, but that blimp didn't exactly end well.

Why does the Army need something like that? It would be the first air asset in its arsenal that can remain at 20,000 feet for up to 21 days. One Army official judges it would take 12 Reaper drones to do an equivalent amount of spying.

Its first destination: Afghanistan, next summer, where eagle-eyed locals might be forgiven for thinking they're seeing an alien mothership.

Image: Northrop Grumman

Month-Long Flight of the Voltron Drone

What could be more UFO-like than a flying robot that can spend a solid five years up in the air? That's what Darpa, the Pentagon's out-there research branch, is trying to pull off with its "Project Vulture." That's a long way away, so Darpa is taking it slow — one month at a time.

The challenge of keeping an unmanned aircraft aloft for a month — well, and the $155 million contract at stake — got the aerospace industry working overtime. Aurora Aerospace, one of the bidders, submitted this design, dubbed "Odysseus." It's three 160-foot drones in one that would meet in flight and interlock like Voltron.

Powered largely by sunlight during the day, Odysseus would latch into the Z-formation pictured here to maximize light absorption through its solar panels. At night, it'd flatten out to make more efficient use of its collected energy.

This fall, Darpa opted against Odysseus and went with Boeing's similarly-solar-powered SolarEagle, a design only slightly less crazy. The SolarEagle is a thin, white drone with a 400-foot wingspan — the David Bowie of unmanned planes — with four long fingers to carry a payload instead of a traditional fuselage. Boeing's got till 2014 to keep the SolarEagle aloft for a month at 65,000 feet, about three times as high as most drones.

Image: Aurora

Air Force Alienlike Stealth Plane

Over 100 feet long with a 56-foot wingspan, the Air Force's old unseen fighter, the triangle-shaped F-117 Nighthawk, looks like it came from outer space. The Air Force didn't even acknowledge having it until 1988, seven years after its first flight. And true to the mystery surrounding it, it was born in the Nevada sands near Area 51.

Like a lot of top-secret airplanes, starting with the U-2, the Air Force spent the F-117's test cycle near Groom Lake, right by the restricted-access base synonymous with paranormal activity. With the government not acknowledging the Nighthawk's existence in the 1980s came a rise in "triangular" UFO sightings. Even now, two years after the Pentagon announced it would stop production of the F-117, debate rages among UFOlogists about whether a curious shape in the sky is a Nighthawk or something more extraterrestrial. Kind of gives a new meaning to "stealth."

The Navy was so enamored of it earlier this decade that it offered to help develop the EKIP, offering a Maryland location up for tests. Even despite the post-Cold War cooperation that the EKIP represents, the hovercraft suffers from a lack of funding, but its engineers still want to keep the flying-saucer-looking craft aloft.

Photo: EKIP-aviation-concern.com

Russian Missile Failure Lights Up Norwegian Martian Hunters

Don't ask Russia about its disappointing Bulava missile launch last year. What started as an attempt at testing out a ballistic missile from the White Sea became a seminal moment for Scandinavian space-watchers.

The Russians have had bad luck with their experimental submarine-launched nuke-ready missile: Seven out of its 12 tests have been failures. But last December's test lives in infamy. The missile let off a spiral of white and blue light, freaking out residents of the Norwegian city of Tromso. Fish-factory worker Jan Petter Jorgensen captured the spiraling flash on camera in the pitch black. "I could not believe my eyes, and got the shivers and was quite shaken by it," he reflected after his footage caused an international sci-fi stir.

Soon after, the Russian Defense Ministry manned up and said the flashing lights were due to the Bulava's motor spinning out of control. But our own GeekDad had the far more industrious idea that the sky-spiral was intended to promote ABC's V reboot. If only the show itself was as interesting.

Photo: Globalsecurity.org

Naval Aviation Gets Flapjacked

Charles H. Zimmerman was a can-do guy. An engineer for a precursor of NASA, in the 1930s, he figured he could increase a plane's efficiency by making it mostly wing. That was the origin story of one of the odder designs in the history of naval aviation: the Vought-173 "Flying Flapjack," basically a flying saucer with two big propellers, sending airflow over the wings even when the Flapjack slowed. Conventional fixed-wing aircraft couldn't do that, and struggled to maintain altitude at slow speeds. But its sleek design made it "a sure bet to lead the field in the race to smash the supersonic barrier," marveled Modern Mechanix in a 1947 cover story.

It wasn't to be. While the Navy commissioned a a prototype in the late '30s, it decided to go with jet aircraft during the Second World War, and the same year Modern Mechanix put the Flapjack on its cover, the Navy pulled the plug. Still, it wasn't all a failure: The Vought-173 ultimately climbed to 5,000 feet, despite its funny-looking fuselage, and earned the respect of Charles Lindbergh, who even flew it once.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Inside-Out Helicopter Platform

Zimmerman didn't just dream up the Flying Flapjack. In the 1950s, he had an idea he thought would revolutionize aeronautics: Put a helicopter's rotors underneath the pilot. Easy enough to generate lift, and the shifts of the pilot's weight could guide the unusual conveyance in the desired direction. The Office of Naval Research and the Army figured: Why not?

By the middle of the decade, a New York helicopter company called de Lackner designed what became known as the HZ-1 Aerocycle or HZ-1 Flying Platform. Powered by a 30-kilowatt motor, two 15-foot rotor blades spun in opposite directions beneath the platform, with four pods (later skis) at the platform's extremities for balance.

The Army, improbably, ordered 15 Aerocycles from de Lackner, perhaps taken by the thought of an inverted personal-use helicopter that could drop soldiers into a fight at speeds of 65 milers per hour.

Modern-Day Flying Saucer

S, it may be the case that flying saucers basically failed over the years, be it the Avrocar or the Flying Pancake. That didn't discourage a British inventor named Geoff Hatton.

To get his small hovering drone into the sky, Hatton used a physical occurrence called the Coanda Effect, in which air is attracted to a curved surface and can be pushed down for a lift effect. Smaller than a meter in diameter, Hatton's saucers are operated through remote controls and buzz like an insect. He put together a company called GFS Projects -- Geoff's Flying Saucers -- and won a research contract with the U.S. Army.

That didn't stop GFS from running into financial trouble, and last year a different British aviation company, Aesir, acquired Hatton's work. Aesir seems to be continuing the effort -- a shot in the arm for those who grew up thinking flying saucers were cool and figuring they'd model their own designs off (presumed) alien technology.